johnbreslin's blog

On behalf of the programme chairs for BlogTalk 2008, I would like to thank all participants at the conference. We would like to ask you if you would be so kind as to complete our post-conference survey at: https://www.unipark.de/uc/blogtalk2008/

As regards next year's conference, we have had an interesting offer to host the event in Korea. We are also looking at Seville for BlogTalk 2010.

We've created a map showing the main places of interest (event locations, restaurants, pubs, shopping locations and tourist sights) during BlogTalk 2008. The conference venue is shown on the left-hand side of the map. We will also have a hardcopy for all attendees.

I'm happy to announce that we have four interesting and varied keynote speakers lined up for the BlogTalk 2008 conference on social software in Cork this March.

Nova Spivack - Founder and CEO, Radar Networks
Nova is the entrepreneur behind the Twine "knowledge networking" application, which allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust. He will talk about semantic social software for consumers.

Rashmi Sinha - Founder, Uzanto
Rashmi led the team that produced SlideShare, a popular presentation-sharing service that some have described as "YouTube for PowerPoint". She will talk about lessons learned from designing social software applications.

Salim Ismail - Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo!
Salim is a successful investor and entrepreneur, with expertise in a variety of early-stage startups and Web 2.0 companies including Confabb and PubSub. He will talk about entrepreneurship and social media.

Final speaker has been selected but has yet to be 100% confirmed.

You can see further details and longer biographies of the keynote speakers at 2008.blogtalk.net/invitedspeakers. We will also have two invited panel sessions, the details of which will be announced shortly.

As organiser of the co-located WebCamp workshop on social network portability, I am happy to announce two invited talks by experts from the fields of the social web and the Semantic Web.

Ajit Jaokar is a mobile web pioneer and a researcher on identity and reputation in social networks at University College London. Ajit is founder and CEO of FutureText publishing, and his latest book was entitled "Mobile Web 2.0". Ajit is also a member of the RSA and of the web2.0 workgroup. Currently, he plays an advisory role to a number of mobile startups in the UK and in Scandinavia.

Dan Brickley is a Semantic Web advocate and researcher. He joined the W3C in 1999 to help establish the Semantic Web project. In 2000, he co-founded the FOAF project, and he has been working on interconnecting the social web ever since. Post-W3C, Dan has been working as a part-time contractor at Joost, is active in the open standards world, and he serves as a visiting fellow at the University of Bristol.